Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children's Nurse in a Northern White Household

By Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson

When interviewed by the Charlottesville, Virginia, Ridge Street Oral History Project, which documented the lives of Black residents in the 1990s, Mable Jones described herself as a children’s nurse, recounting her employment in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson, whose mother employed Jones, use the interview and their own childhood memories as a starting point in piecing together Jones’s life in an effort to investigate the impact of structural racism, and a discriminatory system their family helped uphold. The book is situated in three different settings—the poor rural South, Charlottesville, and the affluent suburb of Larchmont, New York—all places that Mable Jones lived and worked.

Mable Jones was emblematic of her race, gender, time, and place. Like many African Americans born around 1900, she lived first in a rural community before moving to a city. She had to leave school after the eighth grade and worked until a year before her death. And her occupation was that held by the majority of African American women through the twentieth century. Reflecting on her life, local civil rights leader Eugene Williams asked the authors to document the "segregation in Charlottesville that Mrs. Jones endured." This book honors his charge by highlighting the limited choices available to her. It documents the slow progress of change for many African Americans in the South, explores the still little-known experiences of Black household workers in the suburban North, and reconstructs the textured lives that Mable Jones and the many women like her nevertheless carved out in a system that was and continues to be stacked against them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Oct 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9780813946665

Emily K. Abel

Melanie Kay Smith (PhD) is an Associate Professor, Researcher and Consultant whose work focuses on urban planning, cultural tourism, wellness tourism and the relationship between tourism and wellbeing. She is Programme Leader for BSc and MSc Tourism Management at Budapest Metropolitan University in Hungary. She has lectured in the UK, Hungary, Estonia, Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well as being an invited keynote speaker in many countries worldwide. She was Chair of ATLAS (Association for Tourism and Leisure Education) for seven years and has undertaken consultancy work for UNWTO and ETC as well as regional and national projects on cultural and health tourism. She is the author of more than 100 publications.

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Cover Page for Limited Choices

Limited Choices

Limited Choices

Mable Jones, a Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household

Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2021

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Abel, Emily K., author. | Nelson, Margaret K., author.

Title: Limited choices : Mable Jones, a Black children’s nurse in a northern white household / Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021023498 (print) | LCCN 2021023499 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813946658 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813946665 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Jones, Mable (Mable Walls), 1909–1995. | Abel, Emily K. | Nelson, Margaret K. | African American women household employees—Biography. | African American women civil rights workers—Biography. | African American women—Social conditions—20th century. | African Americans—Migrations—History—20th century. | Migration, Internal—United States—History—20th century. | United States—Race relations—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC E185.97.J7743 A64 2021 (print) | LCC E185.97.J7743 (ebook) | DDC 323.092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023498

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023499

Cover photos: Mable Jones and four Klein children (top; courtesy of the Klein family); Mable Jones holding one of her grandchildren (bottom left; courtesy of the Klein family); six of Mable Jones’s grandchildren (bottom right; courtesy of Theresa Williams)

Contents

Foreword

by Andrea Douglas

Acknowledgments

Chronology of Life of Mable Walls Jones

Introduction

1 | We Had My Home Down There

2 | While Jim Crow Ruled the South

3 | Surviving in the Great Depression and World War II

4 | The Social Paradox in the North

5 | Would You Come Up for Six Months or a Year?

6 | We Marched from Downtown . . . up until Mt. Zion Church

7 | Nobody Left but Mable

Afterword

Appendix: Interview of Mable Walls Jones

Notes

Index

Foreword

In the early days of conducting research for the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center’s permanent exhibition, scholarship about African American postemancipation life in Charlottesville was sparse. A library search for Virginia landed you in Norfolk and Richmond but rarely in Charlottesville proper. Although former University of Virginia professors Scot French and Ed Schwartz had used the Black neighborhood of Vinegar Hill as a fodder for their classes, information about African American life of this era remained within the realm of the academy, unavailable to a larger public. French, Schwartz, and others like them are indebted to two groups of African American genealogist and researchers: first, the Burke Brown Steppe Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (1995), and then later, the Our Legacy group (2002). These organizations, along with the newly formed Preservers of the Daughters of Zion Cemetery continue to investigate family histories and have expanded the historical knowledge of Charlottesville’s African American community. Currently, we are experiencing a resurgence in interest in local African American history as the city’s glaring inequities were laid bare by activists before and after the 2017 Unite the Right rally. Where many Whites in the community assumed that Charlottesville, lacked a race problem and was invaded by White supremacists, local activists, especially Black activists, enumerated the area’s long history of homegrown racism. Moreover, our youth activists are demanding that African American history be taught in local schools. Today, the emphasis is on authentic voices, a call that, in practice, reintegrates Black agency into the American narrative.

An authentic Black narrative has been elusive in the public realm in part because of the sporadic presence of a local Black press. The city’s first African American newspaper, the Charlottesville Messenger, operated from 1901 through 1932. It was followed by the Reflector from 1934–1936, and then later by the Tribune (1951–50), an outgrowth of the Roanoke Tribune. The Charlottesville-Albemarle Tribune published from 1954 through 1992, has been the longest record of Black activity. There are few extant copies of the Messenger and the other subsequent periodicals centered on the activities of an aspiring middle class. Quotidian details were filled in by newspapers outside of Charlottesville, such as Robert Mitchell’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, which published weekly commentary on Charlottesville’s goings on as early as the 1890s. The dominant, White-led local newspaper, the Charlottesville Chronicle (1866–1904), which gave way to the Daily Progress (1892–present), provided cursory reporting on Black life and painted African Americans as social subordinates.

To fully grasp the nuances of Charlottesville’s Black experience, researchers have relied heavily on oral histories. Many of these projects originated in the 1990s and were conducted with residents who lived during the height of Jim Crow and who have since passed away. We are now attempting to consolidate these histories into one repository and to record new oral histories. Mable Jones’s oral history is part of the Ridge Street project conducted in the mid-1990s by Preservation Piedmont, a grassroots organization dedicated to the preservation of the city’s built environment. Like others in the series, it is particularly informative because it addresses African American labor, a topic that has gained currency in the broader discourse about equity.

As authors Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson acknowledge, Jones’s oral history and the additional conversations conducted with those who knew her were necessary to broaden their understanding of the person who they believe significantly impacted their lives. However, they have done more than script a biography. By contextualizing Jones’s life within the broader subject of domestic labor, they have allowed us to consider the full implications of African American migration. The city directories after 1900 show that a vast majority of African Americans were laborers, involved in occupations much like those they were engaged in while enslaved. In the 1908 directory, the majority of occupations listed for Blacks was either laborer or domestic. These occupations would permit many in the community to purchase property, leading to greater overall stability. In fact, beginning in the 1890s, and by the final removal of Vinegar Hill, at least 50 percent of the African American community were homeowners. Such prosperity was hard fought, and by the time Mable Jones was born, it may have seemed impossible for most Black citizens. Virginia’s 1902 constitution deliberately redressed whatever gains Black Virginians had achieved. Its ultimate goal to effect the complete disenfranchisement of Black men was successful—throughout the state, the 147,000 eligible African American voters were reduced to 21,000. In Charlottesville only eighty Black men were left with the ability to impact policy. Nonetheless, the Black community continued to make gains. They petitioned for a high school that would offer a modicum of communal security since it relieved the need to leave town in order to be educated past the seventh grade. Arguably, the building and the school’s subsequent accreditation in 1929 reflected one of the last major gains for the Black community during the period. By the time Mable’s family arrived in Charlottesville in 1925, additional curtailment of African American prosperity came in the form of de jure restrictions on property purchase. These race-based constraints established the boundaries of Black neighborhoods, where growth and wealth accumulation was further diminished through the denial of public services. For instance, the Ridge Street neighborhood where Jones eventually returned was one of the last Black neighborhoods to receive public utilities.

From her oral history, we learn that Mable went to the Jefferson School until she was sixteen and then quit. This was not an unusual occurrence even though by the 1920s school attendance was compulsory in Virginia. Mable had been working since she was thirteen—her decision to leave school three years later was probably a financial one, as she was responsible for helping her mother. By the time she ended her formal education, the Depression had reached Charlottesville and its negative impact on African Americans was significant. Jones’s move to the North was certainly a result of scarce opportunities in the service industry, where Black labor had been relegated. Understanding Mable’s working conditions in the North further elucidates the realities of Black migration. We understand more clearly the circumstances under which Black domestics maintained familial ties to the South and are made to realize that migration does not break bonds but can strengthen them. Consequently, Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household can be read as a cogent synthesis of modern African American history.

DR. ANDREA DOUGLAS

Executive Director

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center

Acknowledgments

Many people helped us as we tried to document the life of Mable Jones. Above all we thank her many family members with whom we spoke either by phone or in person: Derrick Jones, Charles Jones, Walter Jones, Gregory Jones, Theresa Williams, Wayne Williams, and Thomas Edler.

We also owe a huge debt to a number of other people. Claudia Jessup shared her memories of Mable in the years after we knew her. We met several times with Gloria Gilmore and Robin Patton of One Shared Story. Robin spent one afternoon driving us around Louisa County and another helping us find land records. After our visits, both sent additional documents and photographs, and they continued to answer our myriad questions. In Charlottesville we also met Violet Price, Jean Hiatt, Eugene Williams, and Reverend Alvin Edwards, all of whom had known Mable and could tell us more about her.

Other people in Virginia provided invaluable assistance: Elizabeth Klacynski and Olivia Gabbay at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center; Miranda Burnett, Margaret O’Bryant, Sandy DeKay, and Shelley Viola Murphy at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Historical Society; the staff at the Mount Zion First African Baptist Church; Penny White at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia; Karlene Kovalcik, who helped us locate critical documents at the Louisa County Historical Society; and Chris Farina, who gave us free access to his film West Main Street.

In Westchester County we received essential assistance from Mayra Cabrera at the Mamaroneck Public Library, Barbara Davis at the New Rochelle Public Library, William Hegarty at the Larchmont Public Library, Patrick Raftery at the Westchester County Historical Society, and Mike Tripico at the Mamaroneck Historical Society. At the Middlebury College Library, Wendy Shook and Clement Ryan provided important support. Ilana Offen helped develop the chart illustrating the relationships among and geographical locations of Mable’s ancestors. Emily French created the maps.

Colleagues, friends and family who read all or sections of the manuscript and provided insightful comments include Margaret Anderson, Carla Bittel, Charlotte Borst, Karen Brodkin, Janet Brodie, Susan Burch, Sharla Fett, Naomi Gerstel, Robert Gottlieb, Dorien Grunbaum, Karen V. Hanson, Elizabeth Hersh, Carollee Howes, Sarah Koch, Rachel Joo, Alaf Nash, Bill Nelson, Sonja Olson, Vivian Rothstein, Robert Schine, Jennifer Wang, Alice Wexler, and Maxine Baca Zinn. In addition, we benefited from advice from Rick Abel, Carla Cappetti, William Hart, Nazli Kibria, James Klein, Thomas Klein, Amy Morsman, James Ralph, Burke Rochford, and Ann Shalleck.

Margaret (Peggy) received funding from the Middlebury College Emeriti Research Fund and Emily from the UCLA Academic Senate.

At the University of Virginia Press, we thank Clayton Butler, Charles Bailey, and Helen Chandler, and Ellen Satrom. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Nadine Zimmerli, who supported this project from the beginning, offered wonderful advice, and in general did far more than most editors usually do.

Editorial Note: The two authors jointly wrote this book. The order of names is alphabetical.

Chronology of Life of Mable Walls Jones

1909 Born in Green Springs, Louisa County, VA

1911 Birth of her brother Lawrence Marshall Walls

1913 Birth of her brother Thomas Walls

1917 Birth of her sister Beatrice Walls

1918 Birth of her brother Henry Philip Walls

1920 Death of her father, Oscar Walls

1925 Moved to Charlottesville with her mother (Dora Walls) and siblings

1929 Married to James Henry Jones

1930 Birth of her son James Henry Jones

1931 Birth of her son Thomas Marshall Jones

1935–? Lived with employer, Paxson, in Ivy, Virginia

1944 Deserted by her husband James Henry Jones

1944–1946 Lived in Washington, DC, working for our parents, Miriam Borgenicht Klein and Milton Klein

1946–1953 Lived in Larchmont, NY, while working for Klein family, and in Charlottesville, VA

1947 Moved to 609 Parrott Street, Charlottesville, VA

1953–1995 Lived in Charlottesville, VA

195?–1994 Worked for Mamie Virginia Jessup and Claude Jessup

1956 Moved to 409 Ridge Street, Charlottesville, VA

1957 Divorced from husband

1978 Death of her mother, Dora Walls, and her son James Jones

1987 Death of her brother Henry Philip Walls

1984 Death of her brother Thomas Walls

1984 Death of her brother Lawrence Marshall Walls

1992 Death of her sister Beatrice Walls Frye

1992 Death of our mother, Miriam Borgenicht Klein

1994 Death of her employer, Mamie Virginia Jessup

1994 Tree fell on Ridge Street House

1995 Died; buried at Oakwood Cemetery, Charlottesville, VA

Limited Choices

Introduction

mable jones, an african american woman, was sixteen in 1925, when she first arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia, from a rural area with her widowed mother and four siblings. Three years earlier, she had begun her long career in domestic work, the occupation of most Black women in the early twentieth century. I used to wash dishes for somebody in a home and go to school, she told an interviewer gathering information about life on a prominent Charlottesville residential street.¹ Mable left school after eighth grade because, she said, I wanted to get a better job and help my mother. She raised five children. Mable was the oldest and only ten or twelve when my father died. So my mother had a lot of responsibility.² In Charlottesville, Mable’s mother hoped to find better schools for her younger children and higher paying jobs for Mable and herself. The tightening grip of Jim Crow, however, prevented her from fully attaining either goal. Mable remained a household worker until she was eighty-five, long after many Black women had found other occupations. The new opportunities that gradually opened for African American women after World War II were primarily for those who were younger and who had received more schooling.

Mable was born in Louisa County, Virginia, in 1909 and lived there until she was a teenager. At the time of her birth, her parents shared their home with both her father’s brother and his ninety-nine-year-old grandmother, who had probably been enslaved. From the latter part of the nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century, the members of her large extended family earned money through farm labor, railroad work, and paid domestic work; they also relied on unpaid labor and each other for survival. After moving to Charlottesville, Mable returned to Louisa County many times, and her mother and sons lived there from some point during the Depression until the end of World War II. Louisa County remained an important place in her mind. Almost seventy years after she had left, when asked whether any of her relatives had remained in the area, she responded, Yes, we had my home down there.³

Mable’s Charlottesville life extended from the Jim Crow era, through the civil rights struggle, and almost to the end of the twentieth century. The city surrounds the University of Virginia, an institution that was built with the labor of enslaved African Americans and played a critical role in disseminating white supremacist ideas. During the civil rights era, Charlottesville gained notoriety as one of the Virginia communities that fought for years against school desegregation. Before that campaign ended, city officials decided to demolish its most prominent African American neighborhood, Vinegar Hill.⁴ Yet the local Black press reveals that African Americans created a vibrant social life in the city in these decades. Even after the Great Depression struck, they motored to visit friends and relatives in other cities, held music festivals, played cards as members of bridge clubs, participated in quilting contests and 4-H clubs, and enjoyed canning and drying demonstrations. In Charlottesville, Mable married, raised two children, cared for a wide circle of family members, attended church, and spent time with friends, even while working in White people’s homes. Over time Mable’s mother owned two separate houses in the city. The second, on Ridge Street, was Mable’s much-loved home for nearly forty years.

We originally decided to try to tell Mable’s story because we had come to realize that although she played a major role in shaping our lives, we knew little about hers. Like so many African Americans, Mable regularly moved between the Black world and the White one. She began to work for our family in 1944, when our mother had a government job in Washington, DC, our father was in the navy overseas, our older sister was four, Emily was two, and Margaret (Peggy) was an infant. When the war ended, we moved to a New York suburb. At some point in the next couple of years, Mable followed. Until 1953 she lived with us for long periods of time, doing the cleaning, some of the cooking, and a lot of the childcare, especially after our two brothers were born in 1949 and 1951. We never doubted her importance to us. Whenever Mable left, we wrote to her. After 60 years, we still remembered her two addresses in Charlottesville.

Aside from those addresses and the names of her sons, however, we had no information about her when she wasn’t with us. In his 1982 memoir, the theologian Frederick Buechner described his beloved nurse as the mother of much that I was and in countless unrecognizable ways probably still am. Yet, he continued, I don’t know where she came from or anything about her life apart from the few years of it that she spent with us. Nor do I know what became of her after she left, and there is a sadness in not knowing, in thinking of all the mothers and fathers we have all of us had who, for the little we remember them, might as well never have existed at all except for the deep and hidden ways in which they exist in us still.⁵

But it is not just sadness and a desire to honor Mable that motivated us to pursue this research. As a historian (Emily) and sociologist (Peggy), we realized that attempting to document her life would help us understand the constraints that forced so many Black women of her era to leave their families to care for Whites. Moreover, we have come to understand how our personal story is intertwined with hers in ways that extend beyond our few precious memories of the care she gave us. Anthropologist Leith Mullings states, It was the working class and enslaved men and women whose labor created the wealth that allowed the middle class and upper middle class domestic life styles to exist.⁶ We were brought together with Mable Jones by our privilege and her disadvantage in intersecting hierarchies of race and class.⁷ Our family was White and upper-middle class; Mable was an African American working-class woman. To understand her story we had to tell some of ours; to understand our story we had to learn hers.

In writing these stories we have made critical decisions about language. In our inegalitarian society, forms of address are inevitably fraught with overtones of race, class, and patriarchy. When we were children, everyone in our household called Mable Jones by her first name. That informality was definitely not reciprocal: Mable did not use first names for our parents although she did for us and our siblings. We have chosen to call her Mable in this book both because that is how we had always thought of her and because the alternatives grated: one was too formal (Mrs. Jones), another sounded rude (Jones), and a third was both awkward and repetitive (Mable Jones). We like to think that were we to meet Mable now, as adults, our use of first names with each other would be an acknowledgment of mutual respect.

We capitalize Black in this manuscript when referring to people and cultures of African origin. We do so out of respect for the history and identity shared by people of African ancestry in this country. We also capitalize White. We understand that in doing so we adopt a practice favored by hate groups and White supremacists. Nevertheless, we believe that pointed attention to racial identities as social creations outweighs that concern. As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote in the Atlantic in June 2020, The point of the capital letter . . . isn’t to elevate; it’s to situate.⁸ The White people we discuss in this book preserved their shared position and enjoyed its accompanying privileges. These people include upholders of Jim Crow laws, opponents to civil rights, suburbanites in the North living on property protected by racially restrictive covenants, women and men who hired Black domestic workers, and the children who benefited from the care the workers provided.

When we refer to the South, we include Washington, DC, as well as Virginia, where Mable Jones spent most of her life. In that South, Jim Crow laws limited the choices of African Americans. The civil rights movement that